This year is the 50th anniversary
 of Harper Lee's To Kill a
 Mocking Bird. Published during
 the Civil Rights movement, it 
 exposed Southern racist society
 and went a far way toward
 helping to change previously
 accepted attitudes of bigotry. In
 a most humanistic manner, it
 extolled the virtues of high-minded moral values and the courage to stand up for them.
 
It was an immediate bestseller and won great critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It remains extremely popular with more than 30 million copies in print. In 1999, To Kill a Mocking Bird was voted "Best Novel of the Century" in a poll by  Library Journal.
 
As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.
- From To Kill a Mockingbird
 
Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938. As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader, and was best friends with and valiant protector of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote.
 
She studied the law, but did not complete her law degree. In 1950 after studying for a summer in Oxford, England, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC.
 
Lee continued as a reservation clerk until 1958, when she decided to devote herself to writing. She lived the frugal life of a starving artist in a cold-water flat when she wasn't traveling to her family home in south-central Alabama to care for her ailing father.
 
While living in New York City, Lee was reunited with her old friend Truman Capote and also became close with the Broadway composer and lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife Joy. In 1956 the Browns presented her with an extraordinary Christmas gift of a year's wages with a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas."

And write she did. She wrote her first draft that year and signed with the publisher J. B. Lippincott & Co. It took her two more years to complete the book, which was in many ways autobiographical. Her attorney father became Atticus Finch, who bore her father's last name. Harper, herself, was the model for the tomboy Scout and her friend Dill was patterned on Truman.

Truman Capote wrote about the character Boo Radley, "In my original version of Other Voices, Other Rooms I had that same man living in the house that used to leave things in the trees, and then I took that out. He was a real man, and he lived just down the road from us. We used to go and get those things out of the trees. Everything she wrote about it is absolutely true."

After completing To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee accompanied Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to help him research an article for the New Yorker about the murder of a farmer and his family. Capote expanded the material that they gathered into his best-selling book, In Cold Blood, which he dedicated to Lee and his longtime lover Jack Dunphy. But he failed to acknowledge her contributions to the work. While Lee was very angry and hurt by this betrayal, she remained friends with Truman for the rest of his life.

Since publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee has granted almost no requests for interviews or public appearances, and with the exception of a few short essays, has published no further writings.
 
Lee showed her scout-like verve in her 1966 letter to the editor in response to the attempts of a Richmond, Virginia area school board to ban To Kill a Mockingbird as "immoral literature":
 
Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read. Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of double think. I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.
 Lee continues to live a quiet and private life in New York City and Monroeville, where she is active in her church and community. Modest in the extreme, she assiduously avoids anything to do with her still popular novel.
 
I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.

Harper Lee was not the first American woman to expose the brutality of bigotry. Below are several other sheroes who championed racial justice through their writing.